21. A street of tea

The next day, rain was pouring down while I caught a lavish bus, with recliner seats and heaps of legroom, making the three-hour journey from Dandong to Shenyang. The roads took me back in the direction the train had travelled the morning before, passing Fengcheng via a two lane wide motorway that ran through rolling hills and mountainous terrain. The road was elevated above gorges and rivers, villages and crops. Karaoke was again an option, again lacking a microphone, which was starting to even get on my nerves. I could’ve asked, I suppose.

The downpour became heavier throughout the journey and ten to twenty metres below the roads, rivers swelled and burst their banks, running into the crop land and flowed ever closer to inhabited towns and solitary homes. The brown of the water and homes offset the green of the trees, plants and crops, and stretching above for mile upon mile, the road that the bus was travelling on. As the bus continued rolling on, breathtaking scenery and forces of nature combined to present a beautiful yet harrowingly fragile human existence below.

We left the mountains, the rain petered out, and the lush rolling hillside became flat plains of industrial factories that grew into bustling city streets littered with traffic congestion, people, shopping arcades and litter. The bus arrived at the station and as the doors opened welcoming me to Shenyang, I filed out with my fellow passengers, the station surrounded by modern skyscrapers and burgeoning shopping malls.

I collected my backpack and headed for the exit gate. Puddles that had formed on the uneven paving were quickly evaporating under the heat of the now powerful sun. Obligatory sales people offered drinks, fruit, hotels and girls.

A woman outside the station invited me to view some rooms so I followed her into the back alleys nearby.

The first room she showed me to looked fine and wasn’t too expensive, but when I sat on the bed it was little more than a bed-dressed wooden slab. She glowed at the wonder and joy that was the room until I said I didn’t want it and asked for something else, knocking on the bed to say that it was too hard.

Glowing even more, she showed me to a plush, beautiful room upstairs. The price was Y200, which was too much for me, and when I tried the bed, it again was like a desk with a duvet over the top. I laughed, knocked on the bed again, and said no. She tried bargaining but I didn’t bother.

She followed me all the way to another hotel situated to the south of the train station and began abusing either me, the hotel I was walking in to, or both. I ignored her and left her at the door.

After the guided tour of the busy hotels disgusting communal toilet and bathroom facilities, I decided to not stay there and tried to leave.

On the sixth floor, I tried to take the elevator but every time one arrived from the floors above, it was full of people and with my pack on my back I wasn’t able to squash in. For five minutes, each and every elevator that stopped on its way down was full so I gave up and asked for directions to the stairs. The staff looked shocked. Obviously no one had ever used them before. They pointed down the corridor and I was on my way, leaving laughter and chatter about the American behind me.

I found out why they were laughing when I got to the bottom of the stairwell. A chain and padlock held the door fast, keeping me from the outside.

“I’m glad I’m not staying here,” I said to myself. The only exit from the higher floors seemed to be the elevator.

I began to climb back up and on the second floor I found an open door, so walked in.

The door led to a photocopying centre full of completely surprised, shocked, unbelieving faces trying to grasp the concept of a white man standing behind their service counter despite the fact I never walked in the front door.

“Where the hell did you come from?” was the question I could read on their faces.

“Ni hao,” I said to one of the shocked staff members, smiling at her as if there were nothing amiss. “Huoche zhan zai nar?” Where is the train station?

She responded by standing still, not moving a facial muscle while she caught flies. She stayed frozen until the manager intervened.

“You want train station?” he asked in English.

“Yes,” I replied, still smiling like a gimp as I turned to face him.

“Follow me.” He walked into the foyer, down a set of stairs and into the square outside right in front of the station.

“Xiexie ni,” I said, thanking him. “Zaijian.”

“Zaijian,” he replied, smiling and waving as though he was saying farewell to a guest from his home. After walking for a few minutes across the square, I turned back and there he was, still standing by his door waving like a mad man. I smiled and waved back, laughing to myself. I had just made his day.

With a western toilet and bathroom and a bed that wasn’t made of sheer timber, I couldn’t refuse the next room I saw. The young lady showing me the room spoke no English, so I conversed with her in Mandarin. Whenever I said anything, she blushed and averted her eyes, replying while she looked at the floor.

As we stood at the reception desk organising my payment, she was joined by another young lady who did the same thing. Neither of them could look at me. I never realised I was that intimidating. To be fair, I probably blushed just as much, although my sunburnt cheeks probably hid that fact.

I planned to stay one night and after paying, returned to my room for a shower. Before I had a wash, I turned on television, peeled off my clothes and instantly saw an advertisement for a New Zealand rugby match that was live the following evening. Instantly I threw on my sweat-soaked clothes, returned to reception, paid for the following night and began planning my day around seeing the game in thirty hours time.

I left the hotel the following morning, headed towards Zhongshan Square to the southwest and the roads were busy with people zooming from place to place on bikes and in cars. Parks were full of people chilling out and the square, with a huge monument in the centre, acted as a roundabout for traffic. People crowded around to take photos of the massive sculpture, and I was no different.

As I continued my saunter through the city, I saw a van versus scooter accident. It must’ve been a bad one as the ambulance blocked much of the road and traffic even slowed down a little.

People gathered around to look, circling the accident as close as they could get. Thirty people crowded the scene in the middle of the road, with more crowding around by the moment as traffic continued to wiz by. They had to get as close as possible. If there was glass casing surrounding the accident, I’m sure their noses would be pressed hard against it. I took a photo of the group of people.

As I walked away, I wondered why an accident on New Zealand streets would’ve had me much more concerned than this accident. The crowd was still growing when I ventured into a park nearby.

A large congregation of mostly old men sat around a small amphitheatre listening to a young man who offered a vocal recital. When he finished, the crowd fell into appreciative applause and I joined in.

On the way out of the park, I bought a bottle of frozen water from a street vendor and instantly kicked myself for having done so. The cap was partially melted onto the bottle suggesting the guy had filled an empty bottle with tap water and fused the cap back on with a lighter. As evidence, the water tasted disgusting.

Outside the park, where I left the nearly full bottle of water in a rubbish bin, tealeaf vendors had taken over a street. Stretching up and down the alleyway, table after table was packed with buckets of varieties of tea. I walked along looking throughout the containers, each marked differently. Not being a tea lover, I could think of a dozen people who would be in heaven on that street. The tea market stretched for one hundred metres with each vendor packing six or seven containers full of leaves onto their bowing trestle tables while only a few customers perused their wares.

I wasted some time reading while I waited for the evening’s entertainment, then picked up some junk food from the large shopping centre near the hotel and settled in to watch the rugby. And New Zealand lost.